Entertainment

10 Essential Mobile Apps for Baseball Fans

Take me out to the ball game; Take me out to the crowd; Buy me some peanuts and baseball apps…

Today is opening day, thus commencing a long and exciting season of homers, no-hitters (hopefully) and enjoyment from this all-American pastime. If you’re finalizing your fantasy team, fancy yourself a baseball historian, or just love the game, there are a bevy of mobile apps to help you get more out of the 2011 season.

The right pick in the draft can make or break your whole (fantasy) team. You need to have the information up front so you can make informed decisions, maintain the integrity of your picks, and ensure the success of your roster. This app enables users to trade players throughout the season, make impromptu lineup changes and manage your team on-the-go. (Note: You must have an ESPN Fantasy Baseball account for access to all the features of this app.)

Now that you have your fantasy team in place, you should have the accompanying cheatsheet app that will help inform your roster selections. This is a serious game, and when you have a good player on the line, you want to make the best decision possible. This app provides everything you’d want to know about a player, including past season performance, projected stats, injuries, rankings and draft position — insider information, if you will, on MLB players.

This app is a thorough resource for, well, everything baseball. It aggregates baseball news from sources all over the country, and covers topics like standings, injuries and free agency. There’s also a dedicated channel for each MLB team that lets you hone in on the club you’re most interested in. If there are particular stories of interest, you can share them on Twitter and Facebook via the app. It's also available on Android.

Each baseball stadium has a history and life of its own. Regardless of which stadium holds a special place in your heart, it’s still fun to explore the environments in which other teams play their home games. Ballpark Envi gives you an in-depth preview of all other team stadiums in the league using photos and information. You can take a visual tour of the venerable Fenway Park, see the brand new Yankee Stadium, learn a bit of history and even access seating charts. If you can’t get around the country to every MLB stadium, this is a good alternative.

Before you dismiss this app because of its high price, keep in mind that this is probably one of the most comprehensive sports apps on the market. You can customize the app to track your favorite team, or use it as a single resource for everything you’d want to know about the baseball season as it’s happening.

The price tag includes livestream broadcasts of 150 spring training games through its free preview of MLB.tv. Throughout the season, you can reference this app for breaking news, audio/video broadcasts of regular season games and stats for your favorite players and teams. It's also available on Android and BlackBerry.

Cost: $14.99 (There is also a free lite version available, but it does not include any live or archived audio and video broadcasts.)

A late night trade can wreak havoc on your fantasy lineup. Be sure to stay on top of the latest rumors and rumblings with the Baseball Trade Rumors app. This app is a complement to the popular BaseballTradeRumors.com website and keeps tabs on every hint of a move. You can set the app to send you texts with only the content you want — for example, just trade rumors in the National League.

If one thing on your bucket list is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, or at least hit a handful of them, the Baseball Road Trip app is a must-have. It serves as a tour guide for the ballpark and surrounding area. Not only does it provide information on the stadium, seating charts, tickets, schedules, even food options, it also offers details on nearby sports bars, hotels and attractions that you’d want to know about as a visitor. Once you’ve hit all the ballparks and accomplished that gargantuan goal, the app lets you rank the stadiums you visited by preference.

We’ve all heard stories of that one ultimate sports fan who has an amazing ability to recall stats and scores from sports events from 20 years ago. Anyone remember that ESPN game show, Stump the Schwab? Well, if you want to be like Howard Schwab and have an almost savant-like memory of baseball games of yore, the Baseball Memories app is a good place to start. It's a virtual historian, containing everything you’d want to know about 200,000+ baseball games from 1871-2009. In addition to game stats, it even includes details about game day weather, start time and field conditions.

If you’re a data geek and need to see things visually, you’ll appreciate the numerical wizardry that the FanGraphs Baseball app provides. By taking league statistics and analyzing the heck out of them, anyone with a penchant for data will revel in the graphs and analysis around win probability, player stats, individual plays, even team financials. This app gives a whole new meaning to “game day analysis.”

SportsTap eliminates the need to ever have to stop and check the score of the game on the Internet again. The app is updated in real time and provides current scores and game information for the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, NASCAR, PGA and more. You can designate specific teams and leagues you want to follow and have immediate access to the score of the game, as well as see how other teams in the league are faring. Upon logging into the app, the home screen designates your favorite leagues with red circled numbers that show how many games are currently in play. This one is also available for Android.

Cost: FREE

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